Help Lezli Get Better

I think it would be difficult to imagine someone with worse health luck than my dear friend Lezli Robyn. She’s been struggling for some years now with health troubles, from keratoconus blindness which transforms her vision into a blurry, confusing kaleidoscope, to thyroid storms and high blood pressure.

She’s worked for years in the science fiction and fantasy field as a writer, an editor at Arc Manor press, a developmental editor for the Caezik SF & Fantasy and Caezik Romance imprints, editor-in-chief at Galaxy’s Edge magazine, and numerous other projects including various collaborations with Mike Resnick. She was a finalist for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Personally, I would like nothing better than to see Lezli pursue her awesome writing and editing projects because I know how much creative potential she has, but her health challenges have made work almost impossible for a couple months.

To add to all her problems, after a terrible bout of pneumonia in December while traveling to visit her family in Australia for the holidays, she returned to the States with a persistent cough and migraine that developed into what is medically known as a “cough headache”, which is a type of headache that causes excruciating pain every time you cough or change position and change pressure. Watching her with it is like watching someone get tortured by their own body. The pain is very severe and even though she is good at masking and continuing on it has gotten to the point where at times she can barely move.

She has been admitted to the hospital several times this month with the splitting migraine, irregular heart rate, and high blood pressure, most recently as high as 235/123. Concerns that the situation is caused by an aneurysm or cerebrospinal fluid leak have been ruled out by multiple high-resolution scans, thank goodness, but the causes, while not immediately deadly, aren’t great. It turns out many factors are contributing to this migraine, including a tear in a neck muscle caused by coughing so hard while she was sick, if you can imagine that. Other contributing factors include some arthritis in the neck, a healing burst eardrum, and probably most importantly, complications from thyroid issues and high blood pressure.

Lezli had radiation a few years back to destroy her malfunctioning thyroid which means she relies on pills as an artificial thyroid replacement, but that’s proving a significant challenge to manage in combination with high blood pressure, since thyroid medication tends to increase blood pressure. When she got sick with pneumonia, she was too sick to keep medications in her, so the thyroid replacement levels in her system tanked, meaning she effectively has no thyroid function currently. (Thyroid is part of the endocrine system that helps regulate all other systems in the body. Her current TSH level is 87.06, for those in the know to gasp at. It should be below 4.6.)

As a result of being unable to afford consistent medical care last year and trying to balance out so many conflicting factors, she’s in really bad shape now. The ongoing thyroid and blood pressure problems have caused some preliminary kidney damage and she’s having trouble with hypokalemia (low potassium levels), metabolic acidosis (a buildup of toxins in the blood), and proteinuria (extra protein in the urine). Some of this is caused by the inability to keep food down, and she's been put on 10 different tablets a day to help balance all of this – which is also unsettling to her stomach. I’m hopeful she can stabilize most of those levels soon.

Her biggest problem is not being able to work through the excessive pain and stomach upset she's been experiencing. She already worked very little in December and January, and she miraculously had enough money to get through those months (with some help previously offered from the science fiction and fantasy community to help get her and Bindi through their most recent hurdles, which she is so thankful for!), but she hasn't earned any pay this past month and yet she still needs to have further scans and medical visits to get her vital systems functioning properly. This level of kidney disease is quite manageable but needs immediate action to prevent further damage.

No doubt this perfect storm is what contributed to her calling me a few nights back with such a severe bout of vomiting that she needed someone to stay up with her to make sure that if she passed out she had someone to call emergency. It was just so rough to see – no one deserves this.

It’s my belief that this continuous 25+ day migraine is her body telling us it’s time to take some really significant steps to improve her health. Lezli has just gotten health insurance as of Feb 1, 2024, and this will help a lot going forward, though there will still be co-pays and medication costs and general living costs she needs to cover. The cost overhead has been high, including several necessary emergency room visits before she had insurance.

It’s going to take a while to solve this problem and figure out what cocktail of medications will resolve the conflicting thyroid and high blood pressure problems, and in the meantime she’s in too much pain to work.

My heart goes out to her – this past year has been beyond terrible. In addition to the current situation, she’s had several severe dental infections, a burst eardrum, and a bout of Covid 19. It’s really hard to understand how all of this can be happening to one person, and especially such a lovely and sweet one, but here we are. To top it all off, she responds very poorly to certain medications including pain relief, to the extent where it is better healthwise to endure pain than to risk the side effects.

At this point Lezli is quite good at “masking,” or hiding how much pain she is in and just continuing forward with life and trying to be active. However, even when she's able to mask, I know her well and I know what a toll this is taking. And recently it's been so bad she can't hide it at all. Bending over to give her adorable dachshund Bindi some ear medication was enough to send her into a pain spiral that lasted all day. I would love to see financial drama taken OFF the list of things this dear girl is having to deal with, and I know the community can help with that.

I also know how hard it is to ask for help as she has told me she feels like she's had to rely on the community too much so far in the past year, so let’s try to reassure Lezli that it’s ok to be human and need things given our messed-up healthcare situation in the States. I’m grateful she has insurance now, but she also needs time and breathing space to recover.

I’m starting this fundraiser at $5000 though any overage would certainly go towards healthcare and cost of living. I really care about this gal, and I want to see her and Bindi back to normal so we can go back to geeking out about science fiction.

Thank you for any help you can offer,

Francesca Myman

UPDATE as of this a.m.: According to recent doctor's discussions it still could be a "cough headache" caused migraine OR occipital neuralgia caused migraine, which can both have some of the same trigger areas (neck and base of skull). The main feature of both is they have CONTINOUS unrelenting spearing pain with similar symptoms. More tests of the spine will give us a better indication.